The Projects is the name of an annual interactive arts event here in Portland featuring visual arts, music and performance, bringing local and out-of-town artists together in a collaborative atmosphere, with fun workshops, performances, art shows and more! Here are some of my photos from the Projects workshops. At one point I looked up from my drawing and saw at least 60 people totally focused and completely involved in their art projects. It was so cool, every single person I could see was busy making wonderful things!My apologies on the crummy photos, I am a lousy photographer. If you see your photo here and want it removed, or labeled with your name let me know or if I mislabeled you I'm sorry!

A visiting artist from Mexico painting a mural. If you know his name please let me know!

People often ask me how I make my silkscreens and how long they take to make so I thought it could be fun to document and explain the making of a print from beginning to end.

I started this dinosaur drawing about 6 weeks ago.

I wanted to make a new silkscreen with dinosaurs in it. My first drawing

uses the same dinosaur character I designed for a print about 4 years ago but combined in a new pose with a different background.

I wasn't happy with that dinosaur drawing and decided I needed to come up with some new dinosaurs so I spent the day drawing different dinosaur heads to figure out what I wanted these guys to look like.

Somehow from those sketches I ended up with these guys. Here is an early stage of the 2nd version of the drawing. The composition here is working much better than in the first drawing.

I usually do my drawings on small sheets of recycled paper, so you can see I ran out of room on the piece of paper I was using. I have a collage style approach to developing my scenes so I tested out some variations with different add-ons. Below you can see how I taped them together to make sure I liked how it worked.

At this point I decided to do a little research on plants. I drew a variety of prehistoric plants and also just plants that looked right for the piece.

I ended up using the agave plant I drew above, converting it into a kind of palm tree.

I also used the strange cactus-like rosette shaped plant above a few times in the foreground.

I glued the new parts onto the drawing, added paper to empty spots and filled in the drawing to make it a 12 x 16 inch piece.

This is how the drawing was yesterday. It's almost done, I just have to fill in the bottom left corner and fix a few things. The next step will be designing color separations for the silkscreen.